Walking down the Strand the other day, I saw a homeless man sitting in an alcove. He was sitting with his back to the wall, his legs propped in front, on a flat-packed cardboard box. Everything he owned, including his actual physical body, fitted on a piece of cardboard about a metre square.
Last Wednesday, on my way home from Uni, I was eating my lunch on the train, when a man came walking down the train handing something out to everyone. He handed me a packet of Kleenex tissues with a typed mini-letter attached to the front. I thanked him, and paused between mouthfuls of sandwich to read his letter. He couldn't find any work, and was struggling to keep his family. He asked if I would buy the tissues from him. I finished my sandwich, and he came walking back up the train collecting the tissues again. I found it really difficult to meet his eye when he took them back from me.
Why do we feel this way? Most of us, when prompted, say we want to help people who are struggling. But when it comes to the crunch, I walked past the homeless man outside McDonald's and let the man on the train take his tissues back. It actually really bothered me for a while. Did I do the wrong thing? Did that make me hypocritical? What should I be doing to help people?
I'm taking this course at Uni that this term is taking a foray into the world of ethics. It just so happened that this week we had a lecture that seemed to answer my question. I sat in the lecture theatre, squished up next to all these other people that weren't taking any notes, and looked a bit bored to be frank, and I was just typing everything away furiously trying not to literally sit on the edge of my seat. It was a simple case of 'ask the question and look for the answer enough, and you will find it.'
So, the simple answer to the question is, according to my lecturer, or at least my interpretation of my lecturer, being with people.
I love this answer.
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| Two boulders met and fell in love and now they are always together |
When there are so many people struggling in this world, it's too easy for people to keep on walking, and not look back. After all, it's certainly valid to say we do need to take care of ourselves. But, and it's a big but, if we just took care of ourselves, I don't think this planet would be such a nice place to live. Every time you tried to take care of yourself, you'd have to simultaneously be guarding against people, also looking after themselves, who might thereby do you some harm.
So what do we do?
- Option One: Some people would have seen the homeless person sitting on the street and wanted to do something for him to get him off the streets and into work. Maybe they'd have given him a leaflet about services they could use, or even lobbied their MP about homelessness.
- Option Two: Others would have spoken to him, and maybe offered to take him to someplace that could help him.
- Option Three: Someone else (I'm thinking of me, here) would walk past, and feel rising anger about the rising numbers of homeless people in London (and possibly confusion about what to do about it). Maybe they'd give some money to a charity , or write about the problem on their blog(!)
What would you have done?
Our different reactions to poverty were characterised by the lecturer quite helpfully. If you'd have taken Option One, you would have been Working For the homeless man. If you'd have taken Option Two, you would be Working With, with all the energy of option one, but engaging the man in his own redemption. If you would have taken Option Three, you would have been Being For him. Working For is our default setting for dealing with poverty. We want to fix the problem of poverty. Being For expects others who hold the power to make the changes, but it does put us in solidarity with those who are in poverty. However, both of these positions have 'for' in common - they don't need us to make any kind of communication with the actual man. Who will still be sitting on the street on his cardboard box while we're out working or being for him.
Working With demands time to be spent with the man. I think this is a more sensitive approach and is more dynamic.
What all the options have in common is they presuppose that there is a problem that needs to be solved. Coming to the man and approaching his problem is unlikely to make him feel good. If you go up to someone and say: 'Hello - you're representative of a big problem in London at the moment, and I'm going to help solve it.' I think the man would be justified in being a bit annoyed with you. I think that's probably where the issue lies - we're attacking poverty like it's a problem, and it's our duty to overcome it. But, if you look at history, there have always been people struggling with poverty. Why is that the case when we've got enough food to feed the world twice over? Maybe the answer isn't a solution at all, because the question was not really a problem.
There is another option.
- Option Four: Sit down beside the person, share the time of day with them, drink a cup of coffee with them. Ask them about themselves. Wonder what they think of us all walking by.
Have you ever thought that maybe the problem of humanity is not really trying to overcome limitation, but isolation? If the problem is limitation, you've got to work hard to think about some new way to jump over the boundary. If you consider that the problem might be isolation, the answer is much easier to find - it's not in something new, but it's in each other. If you think about poverty as being caused by dislocation, by people being cast aside by society, then maybe we can help these people by including them - by Being With them.
I capitalised 'be' but not 'with' in my title. And that's because I think to be with people we've got to focus on the being. Sit down and just enjoy the fact that you are alive, and they are alive, and in this moment you're spending time with them. What can you learn from them? When you use the Being With model, you don't start with a problem. You just sit and talk. Instead of you being the source of their salvation, they become the source of your salvation. You don't focus on what that person hasn't got, instead you just see the wonder and mystery of what they are and the abundance they already have.
I don't think this only applies to poverty. I think it's applicable to every form of suffering. We need to listen to each other, avoid isolation and promote inclusion. When you truly listen to someone, without judging them, they often find their own answers. Even when there's no suffering, we can enjoy being, together. We don't need to change our realities to do that. The world is not a problem to be solved. It is a gift to be enjoyed.
Enjoy today!!
- rosinaviolets x
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